Starmer was told to vet Mandelson first. So why didn’t he?

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0:31This is a Global Player original podcast. If he misled Parliament, should he have corrected it the moment he realised that statement to be false? What is it about your political operation that you don't understand what the hell is going on? If he wanted to carry out that appointment of Mandelson, he should do the vetting first. I think that, forget me, Badenot, this is all my dreams come true. I encourage all members to engage in respectful debate and our constituents would expect. I therefore know comes to statement, Prime Minister Keir Starmer. After a weekend in which accusations have been flying that Keir Starmer is a liar, is dishonest, that is the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle today telling MPs just take a breath and be respectful when the Prime Minister stands up to make his statement, which he's about to do.

1:27We are going to bring you Keir Starmer's statement, Kemi Baden-Ock's response and our understanding of where this all leaves our Prime Minister at the end of a tumultuous weekend. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:47The News Agents. it's john it's meatless and in a few moments keir starmer will be standing up at the dispatch box in the house of commons with a lot of labour mps very anxious behind him and opposite him will be conservatives baying for blood because this has been a fiasco there's no doubt about it and what we thought we'd do is we'd spend the first part of this podcast while we're waiting for Starmer to get to his feet to talk about how have we got to where we are today and what the issues are that Starmer is most vulnerable on when he addresses those MPs. And in the second half of the podcast, hopefully Starmer will have spoken and we'll be kind of giving a bit of post-match about where we have got to so far.

2:40Yeah. So just to catch you up, where we got to at the end of last week was this discovery from Pippa Crear at The Guardian that the vetting process surrounding Peter Mandelson had been finished and those at the Cabinet Office had decided he had failed it. In other words, he hadn't passed the vetting. That was made known to Ollie Robbins, who was the sort of head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the Civil Service. And Ollie Robbins then took the decision that he would nevertheless pass Peter Mandelson into the appointment that Keir Starmer had already announced back in December, almost two months earlier.

3:21Robbins was dealing with something that looked like a fait accompli. He knew that his prime minister, his line manager, our leader, wanted Mandelson in the job and essentially he made it happen. Now, I think the questions really surrounding this issue now are, if Keir Starmer had been told at the time that Mandelson had failed the vetting process. Would he have gone ahead with it? Or would he have publicly rescinded, taken away that appointment? Keir Starmer went to the Commons. He told Parliament, he told the public that he believed the vetting process had been entirely proper. And today his spokesman basically said, look, he did not willfully mislead.

4:12He did not lie because he understood that to be the case. But clearly the public was misled. Parliament was misled. So I think a lot hinges now on that question of whether it was a mistake because Keir Starmer genuinely didn't know. More and more people around him, to be fair, are saying he wouldn't have lied about this because it's so easy to disprove. We're waiting for Ollie Robbins himself to speak tomorrow. It's a pretty easy thing to disprove. But the question is, if he misled Parliament, should he have corrected it the moment he realised that statement to be false? And that was on the Tuesday evening of last week that he was told and should he have come to the Commons on Wednesday is one of the questions.

4:52Now let's just go back to what Sir Ollie Robbins, the head of the Foreign Office, civil servant, decided to do, which was that he decided that, yeah, there was a problem with the vetting, but Peter Mandelson's appointment had already been confirmed. confirmed so would Starmer have not appointed him if he'd known about it almost seems to me moot because if it mattered about the vetting then Starmer wouldn't have appointed him before the vetting had been completed and that is a really uncomfortable for question for Keir Starmer why if you care about vetting so much as you have said you do did you announce Peter Mandelson as our new ambassador before that had happened then you've got the question of what ollie robbins did or didn't do i think there is agreement now that actually ollie robbins didn't tell the prime minister and ollie robbins said has said or his friends have said i was following the crag act the constitutional reform and governments governance act of 2010 which means it is my responsibility to be in charge of the vetting process and it's not for me to tell number 10 Now, over the weekend, number 10 have come out and said, oh, no, no, no, no.

6:05Sorry, the legal advice surely ought to be that if there is a problem, you tell us. But Ollie Robbins had just been put in post. He had just been appointed as head of the Foreign Office. Keir Starmer has announced that Mandelson is the next ambassador. And what I understand and what Mandelson is telling friends happened about all of this is that mitigations were agreed between Ollie Robbins and Mandelson. And it raised the notional risk around the company he was the chairman of, Global Council. And so there was agreement that he would sell his shares and that there would be supervision of certain meetings with any clients of Global Council.

6:46And on this basis, the outcome of developed vetting, as they call it, was agreed. Yeah, it is entirely possible that Ollie Robbins looked at the sum total of the vetting process and said, OK, we have to be careful about China. We have to be careful about Russia. I think it was the China links that were sort of ringing alarm bells. And we can we can handle this. I'm prepared to handle this. And what you're talking about, that the Constitutional Reform Act essentially, yeah, makes a kind of Chinese wall or a wall that says that civil servants are responsible for vetting and ministers do not specifically get involved.

7:25so they can't do it. But I think overall, this process, there is the kind of who will rid me of this turbulent priest sense, isn't there? That Ollie Robbins came in after Mandelson had been announced, just as the vetting was sort of underway and going on. And it was pretty clear that Keir Starmer or those around him, Morgan McSweeney, had already said, we need to make this happen. And what Ollie Robbins did was deliver the thing. He was in delivery mode. He had to deliver the thing that those around him had said they needed to see happen. One other thing that happened this morning, which I think could well be crucial to some of what we're going to hear later.

8:07Simon Case, who when he was head of the civil service in November of 2024, apparently, according to a document that has now been released as part of this motion, wrote to the PM to say that if he wanted to carry out a political appointment, remember there was a lot of caution from civil servants around this idea of a political appointment, if he wanted to carry out that appointment of Mandelson, he should do the vetting first. In other words, the most senior civil servant in November of 2024, a month before Keir Starmer made that appointment, had already warned Keir Starmer to do the vetting first.

8:50Why did Starmer appear not to go along with that? And we know why he did, because protocol normally allows you to make the appointment and then do the vetting. The fact that Simon Caser specifically wrote him a letter, which we've all seen now, saying, I would do the vetting first, again, sheds questions of judgment. Why weren't you more forensic? Why didn't you ask that question? Why didn't you take the advice of those around you? And look, you know, and then you get to the questions that surround Starmer and his woeful handling of this. Now, on Thursday and Friday, you know, it kind of the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, reform leader, Nigel Farage, were all guns blazing.

9:34He's lied. He's clearly lied. And he willingly lied and he knowingly lied. and actually as the weekend has come clear that doesn't look like it's going to be the case. Although Keir Starmer did say that Peter Mandelson misled me and Peter Mandelson, Keir Starmer never sought Peter Mandelson's view on any of this. I think the phrasing was very careful, wasn't it? If I remember at the time it says I was misled. It's always the passive tense. You know, it doesn't actually suggest that they had direct contact. But that makes Keir Starmer just, you're right, but it makes it more slippery using legalistic forms of words to say i'm not guilty of this what keir starmer has been very willing to do is to immediately make sir ollie robbins the full guy and ollie robbins arguably in the first instance when mandelson was being appointed was just doing uh keir starmer's bidding yeah he had announced that he wanted peter mandelson peter mandelson had been announced as the new ambassador and ollie robbins kind of is in charge of the vetting processes makes some mitigations and says yeah fine go you know and he's thinking he's i think he thinks he is doing what the government wants and he's trying to do it in the most professional manner possible so that there are mitigations there are checks there are other things but kia starmer just said right i want you out now and i think that that is very hard and i think it's caused absolute ructions and the people i've been speaking to are seething in in the government civil service and saying you know how can we work with ministers if at the first sign of political trouble they threw they throw the impartial civil servant under the bus yeah look keir starmer has fired four comms directors two chiefs of staff and now two cabinet secretaries if you think that the original sin, right, if we go back, the original sin was the hubris of thinking that Peter Mandelson would be the right person for that very high level security focused job when we knew that he'd been fired twice from government, when we knew he'd stayed in Epstein's house, when we knew that he had links with companies in both Russia and China, when we knew that he hadn't actually declared anything about Epstein in the vetting process himself.

11:52He says he was never even asked about it. I mean, the hubris of thinking that appointment would work was, I think, the original sin. But the latter movement by Starmer to fire Ollie Robbins, I think is honestly jaw-dropping for exactly the reasons that you say, that he turned around. I mean, he could have handled that. He could have said, yes, I learnt on Tuesday. It was way too late. This is woeful. But I understand the separation of powers that kept that separate. However, you know, I'd like to apologise to the House and the public for having misled them. It was not willful misleading. It was the fact that I only just learnt this.

12:31The idea that you turn around and fire the civil servant, that the man you have brought in to deliver the very thing that you've asked for, and that man, Ollie Robbins, is going to be speaking at nine o 'clock tomorrow morning, Tuesday. So he gets his chance to tell us his story then as well. I do think that was incredibly rash, incredibly precipitous. And we kind of are still waiting for an understanding of what he's been fired for. Exactly. Well, look, there was a bloody good joke in the Financial Times over the weekend where it was quoting a Labour MP who said that, you know, if Keir Starmer wants to stop the small boats, what he should do is rename the English channel the Prime Minister's desk, because nothing ever seems to pass across the Prime Minister's desk.

13:21And so it is, again, that you keep hearing from ministers that he doesn't talk to anyone about anything, that he reads papers, but he doesn't talk to anyone. Now, I suppose the one area where Ollie Robbins has a vulnerable flank is that when Keir Starmer was saying in Hastings in February that there was thorough and full vetting and Mandelson passed with flying colours. How could a senior civil servant just let that go if he knew for a fact that that was not the case? Now that is where Ollie Robbins has some questions that are difficult for him to answer. But overwhelmingly the difficult questions are for Starmer himself.

14:05Why when Mandelson was sacked are you not saying I want to know everything. I need to get to the bottom of absolutely everything. And the idea that, you know, Mandelson was sacked in September 2025, in February 26, in Hastings, you've got Keir Starmer still saying, well, the vetting process was thorough. No, it bloody wasn't. Why didn't you know? What is it about your political operation that you don't understand what the hell is going on? I think there is a binary that either Starmer is lying or he's bloody awful at his job. And I'm afraid that the Starmer defence that we're about to listen to might well be the latter.

14:42It's interesting I think we used to call Starmer ruthless and by that we meant he wasn't scared to fire people he didn't think were up to the job. He fired Morgan or he allowed Morgan McSweeney to go because he thought in that sort of cat in the hat style Morgan McSweeney would take away the toxins with him that it would all come out once McSweeney was gone. The curious thing about this story, genuinely, is I think we slightly finish where we started, which is, I mean, we will know more as soon as the Prime Minister speaks and we'll know more from Ollie Robbins tomorrow. But if he didn't lie, then the opposition and those in his party who want to get rid of him are left just asking the same question, which is, if he didn't mislead Parliament, what is the news here?

15:35The news is that he's a bit hapless, that, you know, as you, on Fridays, you played out this idea that he is the passenger, not the driver, this idea that he is not curious enough, this idea that he lets things happen around him and doesn't take charge. None of that is new. None of that is new to Kemi Badenoch. None of that is new to Nigel Farage, who again today has said he'd like to call for him to go. We can listen to that clip. So it's impossible for the Prime Minister to say that the warning lights weren't flashing. And if you were Prime Minister and there were news reports last September that your ambassadorial choice had failed vetting, you would have thought perhaps he might have had some curiosity to try to find out whether this had really happened or not.

16:23I just find the whole thing totally incredible. Incredible. There is no way the Prime Minister couldn't have known. You're telling me that everyone around him knew and he didn't know? Well, it's possible that he's just a puppet and never consulted on anything, but frankly, it isn't believable. And I do believe strongly that he misled the House of Commons, that he lied to the country. So there you go. We're back to a lack of curiosity, a haplessness, a sense that you're not in charge, you're the passenger, not the driver, But this was all stuff that, you know, was already counted in, I think, to the price already.

16:58So all you're really talking about now is the timing. Now, I don't think anyone's going to move ahead of the local elections. Labour's not going to try and get rid of their leader ahead of the local elections. They want councillors elected. They want, you know, the Labour Party in Wales, in the Senate to do well. They want Anas Sawa, who called the Prime Minister to resign, to do well. against the SNP. So I don't think anything's actually going to happen now. But of course, the opposition are going to call for his head because that's what you do two weeks before a local election. Yes. And I think there is where I agree with you in the limited sense is that, yeah, you know, Kemi Badenok has got Keir Starmer exactly where she wants him ahead of the local council elections.

17:43Weak, enfeebled, people saying, why are you so crap at the job? What's wrong with you? Why are you such a useless prime minister? Oh, that's perfect. I mean, perfect, perfect, perfect. The last thing she wants is some bold, new, dynamic prime minister coming in and knocking her around a bit. So I think that, forget me, Badenok, this is all my dreams come true. I think it is serious for Starmer. I think that this has been another woeful chapter. Whether it's the straw that breaks the camel's back or the last life of a cat or whatever metaphor you want to choose, I think Starmer is in the last chance saloon to use another metaphor.

18:18And I think that he has running out of time, running out of friends and running out of options. It is too close to know how this is playing at the polls. But there is equal possibility that people look at this on the proverbial doorstep, whatever that looks like, and say, I look at the world on fire. I look at the Iran war. I care more about that than I do about the Mandelson saga right now. And I just, I don't, I'm not going to let this play into what I say for now. For now. But immediately, he's got to face the Commons benches and a lot of angry faces staring at him. We'll be in the Commons just after this break.

19:23All the time it's not open for free navigation. That is impacting our economy and our energy bills. If you're Donald Trump and you have failed to convince an enemy to unblock a strait, the best thing you can do is announce that you're, it says here, blocking the strait. The fallout of the Iran war. Follow it live on LBC. Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app. Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? PayCore's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results.

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20:22Mr Speaker, I know many members across the House will find these facts to be incredible.

20:34It's hard to know which is worse. A House of Commons chamber listening to a Prime Minister in stony silence or one that is just laughing incredulously at what they are being told And that is where Keir Starmer is right now. He's three quarters of an hour into giving his statement on the background to Peter Mandelson. It started and Emily, you kind of framed it perfectly. But when you said, you know, the original sin was appointing him. That's how Keir Starmer started by saying I should never, ever have appointed him. That is on me, my mea culpa. And I apologise to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein that I ever thought it would be a good idea to appoint him.

21:23After that, he set out a long explanation. But there are still many holes that are going to be picked over for a long time to come. Yeah, we should say that in many ways, this statement started before the prime minister got to his feet because his statement was leaked. And Aubrey Alleghetti brought this to us, a list of suggested questions in the Commons that loyal Labour MPs could ask the prime minister this afternoon. A lot of them were demanding a sort of a certain amount of aggression towards the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It is curious that after Keir Starmer said that his judgment was wrong, sounded like he was properly going to take it on the chin, said that he took responsibility for the appointment of Peter Mandelson, the rest of what we heard today was very much kicking the civil servant that he had fired on Thursday.

22:21And he carried on telling us that he found it staggering that Olly Robbins had never made his decision, his knowledge about the failed vetting process known to the Prime Minister. Olly Robbins has confirmed he didn't tell Keir Starmer because ultimately that decision did lie with him. Olly Robbins made a decision that lay with him. And it is interesting that we also found out from Keir Starmer today that Ollie Robbins didn't tell Chris Wormald, who is the, now fired, former Cabinet Secretary. So I guess it is fair to say there are a couple of questions still for Ollie Robbins. Who did he tell?

23:06If he didn't tell any minister, if he didn't tell the Prime Minister, and if he didn't tell, I guess, his sort of direct boss, the Cabinet Secretary, Chris Wormald, did he tell anyone about that decision before it came out on Tuesday? Keir Starmer says that process has now changed. But the thing that is unanswered in this statement, despite questions from many on the opposition benches, is why he ignored that bit of advice from Simon Case, who was Chris Wormald's predecessor, that he should do the vetting before he announced the appointment. it seems as if Starmer ignored that advice that came to him in November of 2024.

23:50I think this is the key point and I think this is the key area of weakness. And Starmer's answer to that was it was normal practice with political appointments. So someone who hasn't risen up through the civil service to announce it before you did any vetting. Well, just give me an example of where that has happened, please, because I can't think of anyone who was appointed before the vetting. And the second point is, given Mandelson's background, given Mandelson's fired being fired twice from government for his role in kind of cozying up to millionaires, given his other stories and the knowledge that he had been close to Oleg Deripaska, the Russian billionaire, given the fact that we knew that he had stayed at Epstein's place.

24:41I mean, wouldn't you have said, come on, we've got to do the developed vetting before we make an announcement? And that, I think, is still an unanswered question and a gaping hole in Starmer's defence from what we've heard now in the Commons. Look, technically, protocol was that you make the appointment, you then do the vetting. This is what I've heard from people who've been at the centre of the vetting process, and then they're allowed to start the job. But there is another clue in what he told us today, which you could easily miss if you weren't concentrating on the words. What Starmer told us this afternoon was that the Cabinet Office was conducting a vetting into Mandelson's suitability early December.

25:25I think he said the 10th of December. And he then signed off that appointment on the 18th of December and he announced it on the 20th of December. This is of 2024. The Cabinet Office conducted a vetting through the Propriety and Ethics Committee and they raised a risk flag. that cabinet office vetting early vetting about propriety and ethics came back saying he is risky so don't even wait right for january don't even wait for the next lot of vetting you've already been told there are flags you've already been told he's a risky candidate you were told that in early december and you went ahead and made that appointment anyway he didn't call it the Propriety and Ethics Committee when he made it in his statement.

26:13But I'm pretty sure that that's the thing that he's referring to when he talks about the early vetting by the Cabinet Office. And the other thing that Keir Starmer said was, you know, and it's one of those counterfactuals. Look, if I had been told by Ollie Robbins that he had failed the vetting process, I would have never appointed him as, you know, His Majesty's Ambassador to Washington. Well, you had, you hadn't waited for the vetting and there's a kind of touch of the old Mandy Rice Davis well he would say that wouldn't he from Keir Starmer and I think that you know there was just no following of letting the process play out why would it have made any difference to wait it for the vetting process before you announced his appointment and the other point that has been raised in the Commons for which there was not a very satisfactory answer.

27:06Why in the letter of appointment to Peter Mandelson did it not say subject to vetting? Why was there nothing about that in the press statement that was issued at the time subject to vetting? If Keir Starmer thought it was such a central part of the process, why didn't he bloody well wait and get the vetting report and then make his decision on the basis of that? And those are kind of questions that I still think linger and there is still, to be honest, a bit of a smell around that. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was interesting. We were just listening to Diane Abbott in the house who said, you're talking about process, process being followed.

27:44Actually, most people just care about judgment. Most people want to get to the bottom of this and we all knew what Peter Manilson was like and then she went through, you know, as an MP who has sat through the 90s of the double resignation, the double sacking of Peter Mandelson she brought the house down you know she made people laugh when she reminded everyone sitting there how much we actually knew about Peter Mandelson what didn't you know I guess there are a couple of again this does go back to the sort of timeline the process so forgive me if I get sort of detailed about this but what Keir Starmer is arguing is that as soon as Bloomberg came out with those fresh reported details about the intimacy between Mandelson and Epstein in September of last year.

28:33And the leaking of vital documents. And the leaking of vital sensitive commercial documents and government documents. Then he says, then Keir Starmer says, I sacked him. Full due diligence was established then. And he says, I don't accept that the Cabinet Secretary would not have been told that was Chris Wormald. On the same day the Foreign Secretary, Ollie Robbins, provided a statement, vetting was carried out and granted by the FCDO. It was conducted to the usual standards. He's again trying to make Robbins sound like a liar or sound like somebody who has withheld vital information. Once again, I think Ollie Robbins is still in the clear with that because yes, vetting was carried out.

29:13And yes, technically it was granted by the FCDO. This was a decision that Ollie Robbins made, as we discussed in the first half, because he knew that that's what was required of him. So I still think it's quite hard to find the areas that Keir Starmer can point to where Robbins knowingly did wrong. Right? I mean, of course, Starmer's saying... You go on. Well, I suppose that... OK, so, yeah, on the kind of the developed vetting and not telling Starmer, Ollie Robbins, I think, is on incredibly safe ground saying it wasn't the precedent to do that. I am the official who has the power to do that.

29:58And I am the power also. But should he have changed his story in September? Probably yes. But should he, when Keir Starmer is going out and saying that the normal vetting processes were followed, he then should have surely told the prime minister, hang on, I ought to tell you, that actually there were flags raised and there were mitigations. If this tells us one thing, it's that the vetting process probably belongs to the sort of mid 1600s, right? Right. And somebody needs to look at process versus kind of common sense, bang your head against a wall. Yes. But that but but when Starmer is putting himself up as the prime minister who was going to clear up government after the tawdry years of conservative misrule during Boris Johnson and misleading the House.